In Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA guy told the Al Qaeda terrorist who was being tortured for information, “In the end, everybody breaks, its biology”. How true is that statement? Is it really inevitable?
Pretty much I understand; it takes just a minute or two to “break” a person with something like waterboarding. Although there’s probably the occasional psychotic or catatonic or whatever who is too mentally ill to respond as expected. Keep in mind though that the “information” you get from torture is going to be mostly garbage; lies and random babbling told to make you stop. Plus your victim may be simply incoherent.
Probably. Just between oxidative stress and transcription errors not to mention retroviruses and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
But finding a way to turn on our ability to renew our telemeres would go a long way to preventing cellular senescence - as one example. Whether that would increase longevity is an open question. But the fact that we eat away at these with every cell division and our cells have to be renewed for us to live . . . yeah, that’s a pretty big catch 22 right there.
edit - since you have cultivar in your name (hayflick limit) 
Yep. Breaking things is easy. Breaking them in a way that produces something useful in the process - much, much harder.
There must be some technique to prevent it. US special forces and CIA etc. have anti-torture trainings. What I want to know is how effective are these, because according to that CIA guy everyone breaks eventually. Do these anti-torture trainings just significantly prolong the process of torturing, before the detainee finally “breaks” and give out the information, or are they so effective that no valuable information would come out?
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IANA expert but I imagine there are two key components to the training. One is learning what to expect in order to mentally prepare yourself should you be captured. The other, which is bolstered by the first one, is the ability to hold out as long as possible. Critical information is often time-limited; the longer you hold out, the more likely the information will be useless.
I’d be very surprised if the training claimed to be able to keep you from breaking indefinitely.
I assume part of it is training in how to give false info once they do break. Was it John McCain or someone else who “gave up” names of the roster of a particular pro football team, for instance?
Nope. A lot of people probably die before they “break”. So it’s a lie meant to lead the victim into believing that its OK to break because “everybody” does. You see, the authorities are allowed to lie and lie they do. In the movie the actual information they obtain comes from them telling him a lie, that he gave information while in a delirious state that proved useful. Mixing lies and truth with pain and reward is really what it’s about.
Translation alert! I think deltasigma misunderstood the OP, thinking that the OP was using the word “break” to refer to biological illnesses such as old age. That’s how I read the OP, based purely on the subject line.
But from the actual first post, it is now clear to me that the question is about a psychological break, i.e., when a torture victim finally gives up and responds to the torturer’s questions.
Waaaaaaa!!! im no brain stuff wat is ree dings.
This is false. A person under torture will tell the interrogator whatever he wants to hear, just to make it stop. Some anecdotal evidence (such as that from John McCain) suggests a person’s ability to withstand pain is much higher than what they think it is, and in some cases torture will make the subject angrier and less compliant. It’s not just immoral, but ineffectual as well.
In fact, IIRC from the news reports, the key fact in finding bin Laden’s courier, which led back to bin Laden, is that people did NOT break. They knew they had someone important when the vast majority of prisoners at Guantanamo said they did not recognize the guy; instead of saying, “Oh, that’s al Baddy, he’s just some jerk who ran a few courier missions and quit” they said they did not know him at all. So the interrogation actually gave the opposite of “break”. It’s just not good film-making and does not justify torture.
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
They were watching the fellow’s satellite phone, and one day the phone went live briefly in an unusual location. Cue the helicopters.
The fact that he has to say it pretty much proves it isn’t true. Think about the torture meta-game. If people really reached “X” amount of torture and spilled their guts honestly and completely, he wouldn’t even bother telling him that “everyone breaks”; he would just keep torturing until that happened. Pretty much you have to convince someone that they’re going to break and that it will be easier to just spill the beans now.
Of course you can waterboard someone for 80 hours nonstop and get them to say something. They’ll probably say a thousand different things. But they could all be true, none of them could be true or only one of them could be true. Without some form of cooperation you won’t be any better off than when you started.
It is also an issue, one which would prolong torture, that the interrogators simply do not know when the desired information is elicited. So, demand for confirmation ensues. In movies there is usually a moment when the torture ceases, and the bad guy says something like “There, was that so hard?”. It doesn’t work like that.
That would be more believable if the population of Guantanamo bay hadn’t overwhelmingly been innocent people with no knowledge of bin Laden’s activities.
“Torture is fun, and we can make people say whatever we want”. That’s the “torture meta game”. It’s about sadists and psychopaths forcing people to spout the lies that they or their superiors want to hear, or making an example of someone to terrorize the populace, or just indulging themselves. If they cared about the truth, they wouldn’t be using torture; not when it’s been so long discredited as an effective method of interrogation.
I could imagine a scenario where the threat of torture or pain/death gets a suspect to confess something they aren’t that interested in keeping secret.
Seems the key is being able to read someone well enough to know when they truly have nothing else to offer and stopping, torture itself seems useless.
Everyone’s body breaks, it’s biology. That’s true.
As to the subtext, everybody gives up their secrets? No, they don’t always.
I would be very surprised if even half the prisoners were “innocent people”. I’d believe that of a prison in Afghanistan or Iraq (or the outsourced ones in Syria) but the people brought to Cuba were brought for a reason. The problem was, with guys like bin Laden’s driver, can you really believe the guy when he says “all I did was drive him around”?
For example, the Canadian child-soldier, Omar Khadr, was captured in Afghanistan and has spent his life since age 14 in Guantanamo. Innocent - yes, inappropriate to hold a child in prison, yes, inappropriate to charge someone with terrorism for being a front-line battle soldier, yes, but he and his father were close enough with bin Laden that he saw a lot of the entourage there.
From cross-referenced intelligence they had a good idea where people fit in the organization and who they might know. When people who should have seen the guy said they had absolutely no knowledge - that said something.
My point still stands. Torture was just providing stress relief for the sadists. The people who knew did not break, the giveaway was the failure to explain the blanks in the data. Whether this was a refusal to give ANY detail, or simply a selective refusal to talk about important stuff, I don’t know. But even torture did not get this out of them. An accident with technology gave us bin Laden.
Of course, they may have been following 5 or 10 or 50 similarly promising leads pointing elsewhere and got lucky on this one. Until it’s all declassified in 50 years, we’ll probably never know.